The Blog Post Mindset is the only mindset you should have for non-fiction reading
Ever since I was a child, I’ve always thought reading a book and not finishing it was bad. I thought it was disrespectful to the book and always felt like I let myself down for not finishing what I’ve started. You might be still thinking this way, but I don’t anymore.
Think about how you would read an article or a blog post. Especially if it’s a long one, this is probably how it would go:
Scenario 1: If the blog post interests you and you think you are getting value out of it, you would keep reading and potentially finish it.
Scenario 2: If at some point you think you get the idea, the main points that the writer tried to make, you would save the blog post, or take some notes, or just stop reading it.
Scenario 3: After reading a couple of sentences or a paragraph, if you don’t think you would get any value, or just think it’s a boring or a bad blog post/article, you would stop reading and don’t think about not finishing it at all. This is the blog post mindset.
I first came across the term “The Blog Post Mindset” from one of Ali Abdaal’s videos. It basically means, treating books as blog posts. They are not sacred or holy. So it’s completely ok to not finish a book. As long as you get the value you want from the book, or if you want to stop reading that specific book for any reason, you should just stop.
When I was younger, I was mostly reading for numbers. I used to enjoy telling my parents and teachers how many books I’ve read. That actually is the dumbest reason for reading books. At the end of the day, reading should be for increasing our intelligence, not to seek status or brag about how many books we have read. Naval Ravikant on The Joe Rogan Experience talks about why he doesn’t read books to finish them. He says: “I would rather read the best 100 books over and over again until I absorb them than read all the books. So I don’t read anymore to complete books, I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity.” Ali Abdaal named this approach The Blog Post Mindset. Ever since I came across this term, this is the approach I’m taking towards reading books and it feels like a weight off my shoulders. I don’t care about how many books I read anymore, all I care about is the value I get out of them, whether I complete the book or not. So that’s how this mindset has changed my approach to reading.
Baturalp Akin 